Tales of Jadis 4 - Twins of the Apocalypse (Part 1 and Part 4)
by Glenstorm63
Summary: Jadis and her sister Katil discover what it really means to be at the pinnacle of breeding and power in a dying world. Jadis makes the final plunge and speaks the Deplorable Word and discovers its effects. A work in progress which will later fill in the gaps and tell of Jadis's discovery about her world's fate and what she can do to save herself.


Tales of Jadis 4: Twins of the Apocalypse

Setting: City of Charn. Year: 37 BDW - 21 BDW

At the moment of their birth, the huge dull red sun was at its zenith over the City of Charn and each of the two moons were visible in the dark sky at the same time. It was the brightest of days and the warmest of days. It was late summer and the storms and rains of the wet season had blown themselves out. The Rivers were full and turbulent, the flood plains were burgeoning . The harvest would be abundant. The fish would be plentiful. The Lamassu would grow fat this year. The mother survived. It was a rare conjunction. All portents were of the very best. The cities of the great plain celebrated for the next year.

The twin girls were so alike, almost none could tell them apart. By age two, they were tall for their age and were beginning to speak in sentences of more than eight words. Sometimes they combined forces to contruct even more complex statements and questions. Sometimes in unison. They were uncanny for their age in the midst of a ruling class in which the uncanny was the stuff of normality.

Katil and Jadis had been four when they first deliberately dressed in each other's clothes and hoodwinked their nurses. They even managed to adopt each other's slightly different emerging mannerisms. Jadis had practiced Katil's proud toss of black ringlets, hands on hips and pouting lips, which Katil commonly used when one of the nurses was trying vainly to discipline her. Katil in turn, had mastered Jadis's determined baleful glare, flaring nostrils and imperious chin jut. They had giggled and clasped each other in delerious triumph after they managed to maintain the ruse for a whole day. It was only at bedtime that the nurses had confusedly realised their mistake when they saw Katil's small birthmark on Jadis's tiny waist, and Jadis's torn toe-nail on Katil's delicate foot.

Being in charge of the Empire's future rulers was a heavy duty. Having two four-year-olds deliberately playing cat and mouse with them to the point of distraction would have provoked many nurses in lower echelons of the upper castes into striking their charges with hard hands on the buttocks and legs and they would have been excused. But with slow torture, mind control, bloody sacrifice and execution as a faceless criminal an ever-present threat, for anyone even _looking_ at royalty with hostility, the girls were effectively protected from any harm or consequences. The wariness of the nurses deepened and the girls noticed. One of the great lessons in the education of those with ultimate power was being learned.

...

By age seven, Katil had also mastered the art of summoning servants and functionaries at a distance of a chebel (a hundred feet), without voice and, mysteriously, had begun to learn how to shroud her favourites from similar influence from anyone else. This was without tuition. This had consequences for both she and her servants. Several of those for whom Katil had a soft spot were punished severely after not responding to the summons of the current ruling aunts or the priestly uncles.

After some time, Katil was summoned into the presence of the Grand High Priest by mind force, so she could experience first-hand what it was like to be drawn against one's will. This man, draped in long pleated robes and adorned with curled and oiled beard and a tall head-dress, was her own father, although she did not know it at the time. She arrived in his august presence covered in beads of sweat and suffering from something akin to asthma. Through his unbending will from which she could not have escaped if she had tried, he spoke to her kindly, praised her for her early development and accomplishment and taught her words of power which could be used to soften and stroke those summoned so that they came willingly. He demonstrated the power of these words on her himself in the most powerful manner imaginable and then severely admonished her, regarding abuse of power, whilst she was at her most vulnerable. When she returned to Jadis who was full of questions, she was silent, indeed could not speak. She was shaking and she could not stop until well after bedtime and it was only as she was enveloped in the comfort of Jadis's warm arms that she finally cried out the shakes and slipped into troubled sleep. This experience began a silence between them which did not lessen with time, but grew.

At about the same age, Jadis had discovered her innate ability to destabilise the very substance of things. She found she could boil water if she concentrated intensely, although she tended to also heat the stone jars, tables and floors upon which the stone jars sat, whilst the water simply vapourised. Once, she melted the metal cup in which sat cold water that she had wanted to drink hot. It caused a small fire.

This ability had been expected but its unharnessed strength and early arrival caused some consternation in the palace and courts once it was tested. She was set to train at once and within the year had successfully reduced rocky hillsides to gravel and sand which were then used to pave the new road into the city and she lit the fire to celebrate the event with her mind alone. She was told that in time she would be able to heat-glaze the entire palace and places of sacrifice with the most exquisite colours of lapis-lazuli, malachite, and cinnabar once artisans had completed the application of the right pigments.

...

They trained each other in their talents too of course and whilst either Jadis or Katil each remained respectively more adept at one talent or another, they each had wild card tendencies which surprised both them and their tutors.

As the years went by the two became so adept at impersonating each other, that when the time had nearly arrived for their formal consecration at age sixteen under the dark sky and the red sun, bathed in the blood of high priests under the watchful eyes of the entire aristocracy, they began to succumb to the temptation again.

But their great aunt, the Dowager Empress was wise to their games. They almost knew it. They almost dared it. They almost wanted it. Almost.

She came to them in the dark hours of the night. Tall and muscular despite her age, striding in her silken gowns of purple and green, diadem flashing, she entered their inner apartment. She silenced the servants with a glance, flinging open the doors to their bed chamber with a gesture. She stood palms outstretched and loudly chanted arcane words of power, reducing the nightgowns and bedding material covering their sleeping bodies to dust. They themselves felt the electric frisson of near destruction leap between them. There was the smell of ozone.

They stared in fright into the gloom at this apparition. The twin moons of Charn's world caught their breasts and arms in their subdued light though the arched windows on either side. Dust slithered from their naked forms to their bare mattresses, a chill powder, rendering them shocked and speechless.

"How dare you entertain thoughts of such sacrilege. You shall bring the wrath of the sacred sentinels upon this city with your impiety" she hissed. "Long have you two been watched and monitored from afar. Your combined wit and talents have been thought the greatest boon, the potential salvation for our ravaged nation, wracked by war, slavery and degradation. It was considered lucky when the two of you sprang from one womb, as alike as two grains of sand. So twas said in the streets and the temples and amongst the priests. But know this! There is another reading that has lingered like the taste of bitter sap on the lips of those with the great gift. Would you hear it?"

In the dim light they could not read her features, except the glitter of her eyes under dark brows, and the phosporescent lights in her tall diadem, which were coiling dangerously.

They stared at their great Aunt, and glancing at each other nodded mutely.

"It was also said that your twin birth was the advent of the end of the world. That whilst twin crown princes could mean the forging of a new peace, a collaboration of unknowable proportions, a new road away from our empire's spiral into self-destruction, it could mean a deepening of irreligiosity, of ennui, that even the pinnacle of the throne itself could be split asunder, with an ending of the arcane forces which prolong the sun's life and an ending to all that holds this world together."

As if in answer, a fiery rock shot across the sky in a breathtaking flare of white gold. All rushed to the windows. It was gone as quickly as it came, disappearing silently behind the mountains of the East. They held their collective breath ...

Several minutes later there was a sonic boom and the ground quivered.

"Let that be a warning to you" their great aunt said with great gravity.

"This world hangs upon a thread! It is only by the sacrifice, the blood, the constant application of great magic by the supreme rulers and the steady skillful spells of the royal priests and the control of the populous that we are able to prevent utter apocalypse!"

Jadis and Katil stared at each other horrified.

"No more must you try to confuse your identities, to subvert the sacred duties to your own selfish ends and egotistical entertainments. For if you are not careful, one of you will come to behave as if she is both of you together. The other shall then be bereft and outcast or shall retaliate in kind, to the destruction of us all. We must have you both. Your bond from birth will never be broken, but it must never result in confusion."

"Know this! You both have a great chance to mend your ways and this world. It is what you have been bred for. You two have the capacity, nay, the duty, to bring this world to adore you both and for you both in turn to work in harmonic rule. You shall be as the twin moons to protect this world from the ravages of the universe. This you have long known. But if you continue to mock your responsibilities and take your vows in vain, you shall both be deposed from your path to the twin throne. Your cousins shall be installed there instead. You have understudies in plenty. Never forget that! And your lives will become that which is beyond your worst nightmares. For where there is a crime, there must be retribution. The ending will not be swift.

Katil and Jadis both glared at their Great Aunt. She could not be serious! Or could she? They had only been having a bit of fun. Being so talented, the current pinnacle of breeding for millenia, they had to direct their talents somewhere. They were only bonding with each other, stabilising their own future rule, or so they had thought.

"From now on in, you shall sleep apart, eat apart, learn apart. You shall be groomed separately. You will only come together to perform on high days and to rehearse and perform the rites. You have both been left to your own devices for too long. One day, many years from now if all goes as it should, you both shall ascend the twin thrones at the centre of the Great Ziggurat. But from here on in thou shalt be as oil and water."

Katil was in tears and inconsolable. She shrieked and got down on her knees to beg forgiveness and mercy. She and Jadis had never been apart since birth. Jadis was not far from tears herself, but as was her wont, she was like steel and enveloped herself in icy resolve and glared at the floor. The Dowager studied them both through slitted eyes for some moments before she silently held out her hand, took Katil's hand in hers and leading her out, swiftly departed.

Jadis was left to ponder throughout the remainder of that long night, alone in the cold dust of her once warm comforting bedchamber.

…

 **Many years went by and Jadis learned many secrets, of which more will be revealed here at a later time, but by the time both Jadis and Katil were seven and thirty years old, suffice to say that a. crisis had been reached. And Jadis took fate into her own hands. Herein shall be told the last part of this tale.**

 **...**

Setting: City of Charn. Year: BDW

...

Katil strode up the stairs surrounded by her triumphant but still scared followers who had all committed atrocities in her name.

"Victory!" Katil said, with a voice that was suffused with something like a fierce joy, though to Jadis's eye there was little true joy in her demeanour. The past between them was too painful. They both knew that.

The love they had shared, the bond they had forged before birth in a single womb had been transformed into something else. Something diabolical. The old Dowager Empress and the High Priest had seen to that. By striving to cement the future of this world, by denying the inevitable, they had torn she and her sister apart. It was their fault... and those who had schemed with them. Why, oh why had Katil succumbed to their manipulations?

Katil initially glared at Jadis with what looked like impatience and fury. And then puzzlement. Then recognition. It was still as if looking in a mirror.

Jadis was standing alone facing them with her hands behind her back. And she was not dressed for battle, nor for state. She was dressed in the type of simple white Bramandin linen kilt they had worn as girls, bare-breasted.

She knew that Katil would recognise it was designed to manipulate her, to pull at her heartstrings, to make her barriers crumble. Who better? But it had to be said.

For herself, Jadis was filled with a mix of despair, sorrow, near-hysteria and cold clinical calculation. And she knew that Katil also knew it.

"Jadis!" Katil's voice shook. "We could have ruled this city, this nation, this empire together. This world! It was meant to be our destiny!" Katil looked upon Jadis with what appeared a matching mix of disdain, regret, and dread.

Jadis had enough sanity left to feel, and show, her grief. She said, "Perhaps I would have said that once too. But not anymore."

"But why?" Katil's distress was genuine. "You have been holed up here in the palace for months, even keeping me from the temples! Denying me participation! What was I expected to do? You have steadily killed off all opposition to our ascendancy and then you stand in my path as well! Your statements of regret do not fool me. You are mad! There is a name for your terrible illness. How dare you blame me!"

"I do not blame you... completely. It was bad enough that we ending up fighting my sister!" replied Jadis. "That I do regret. Truly. My reasons you may now never truly understand. Mad I may indeed be now. But hear me out thus far; you need to know that you have paid a price for your own folly."

Katil glared.

"Nay! Do not rail at me! I know of your recent machinations. I know you have swayed the populous, even my own followers with your powers of, shall we say 'friendly persuasion'?"

"Our father taught you well did he not?" Jadis smiled sweetly at her. She could see that coming home to her sister.

"I have recently been deserted, else never would you have won your path this far." She continued. So at the last it was you who broke the cardinal rule that we ourselves set for this conflict. Neither was to use our arcane powers!"

But Katil did not bat an eyelid, just a momentary shift in her gaze. But Jadis saw some of Katil's followers sway. Those who were not consumed entirely with the adrenalin and testosterone of blood lust now knew the gloves were off and that they were vulnerable to Jadis's powers of destruction. But as yet they still really knew nothing. They never would...

"You could have submitted yourself to me and in time you would have been forgiven and we might have ruled together as was always intended... for a time."

"Forgiven?" was Katil's bemused and outraged retort? "For what?

"Know this dear sister. It is I, Jadis who have studied these matters as deeply as anyone has. Perhaps deepest. I have tried to tell you, to warn the priesthood, the council of magi, the ruling aunts who I had to depose. I had to. No-one would listen to me! They would not read the signs. And you, you would not listen, you of all people."

"You would all bury their hearts in perpetual sacrifice and offerings to an old sun that will just consume all and give us nothing... in the end. And so, would you! Everyone was too terrified to face the truth, to listen to me!"

"My demands for audience were met with accusations of sacrilege of all things. Sacrilege? On this world of all cynical worlds? They would go on performing their rituals and magical sacrifices and spilling of blood until the sun expands and envelops us all!"

"I fear that you have been brainwashed and have ceased to think for yourself. But not I. For I have read the signs and faced their true meaning. A few others in the lower echelons have done so now for generations, but they were too lowly to be listened to and too fearful to try. But I was another matter."

Katil growled at her through clenched teeth.

"Oh! This business of the ending of the world my sister? Perhaps you could have assuaged that by directing the vitality of the life blood that now flows in the river of Charn and which drenches the Temples of Bramandin and the Plains of Felinda, into the sun in the proper way? But no, you have wasted oceans and years of the blood magic over the last few months. If the ending of the world is at hand it is because of you. You are a monster!

"Oh you have indeed been brainwashed", retorted Jadis accusingly, disparagingly. Her nostrils flared characteristically. Katil could not help but pout.

"Know this. The future stability of this world grows more desperate and has been growing ever so for centuries. All the efforts of this civilisation will come to naught. Why delay? The sun will expand again, and very soon. The orbit of this world will then plunge us inexorably into it's red abyss. Regardless of what we do. We have maybe a hundred years at best before the fire reaches us. Is our destined rule actually worth it? We are a long-lived race." She looked at her sister bleakly, almost pleadingly, who looked uncertainly at her, gaping with horror.

For a moment Katil began falteringly, much like her old self when they were young children "So, are you suggesting… if that is true, it is too horrible. You have been facing this burden alone?"

Jadis nodded.

But then the wanton destruction of human life, civic and religio-magical culture which Katil had been forced to participate in laid itself on her. She scoffed,

"Enough! I cannot believe I have stood hear listening to your diatribe this long already. Do not think to bludgeon me into submission with words of fear for a moment longer."

Then she ordered her followers to grapple Jadis to the ground, no doubt using her powers of seduction and persuasion to overcome their fears. Jadis was having none of this and holding up her hands before her, chanted words of power reducing her sister's minions to dust, the phantom shapes of which fell slowly to the floor, stirred by wisp's of breeze.

Those lurking just out of sight shrieked and ran, swords clattering to the floor. There was no fighting this type of magic and the horror of it overcame any power that Katil may have had over them.

Jadis gestured and all doors to the inner sanctum were resealed. She had Katil where she wanted and they were alone. Jadis circled her sister.

"Jadis, do not think to intimidate me. You have just used magic yourself. Do you intend for us to destroy each other in this way? Would that be a fitting end? Tell me truly."

She followed this with some words of power which would bind the one to whom so spoken, to speak only truth. But Jadis just shrugged this off with a twitch of her small finger. Katil wavered with the backwash.

"Do not attempt to bind me sister," Jadis said bitterly. "I shall speak truly to you with full candour". She followed this with words of peace and verity in the ancient tongue which confirmed her honesty. She saw Katil's eyes widen.

"No. We shall never destroy each other and that is a vow I shall not break. And yes the world is destined to end far sooner than we thought and there is no way out. Sister, we are the last of the Royal Priest Queens of this world. Ours is a high and lonely destiny. I have thought long and hard and I have made a decision. I drew you here to tell you it. Did you not guess?"

No more would the Lamassu lift their golden heads from the long corn on the great floodplains, no more the flight of a feathered dragon be used to transport a Queen across the deep desert wastes to a far country. No more would a carpet be flown to the great bazaars to buy sweetmeats and ice-treats for young princesses. No more the screams of those slaughtered in the great temples being obliterated by the beating of the sacrificial drums. All would cease. The leaves on the trees would wither, the wind would still. And turn to dust.

"Sister-mine. Know that I paid a terrible price to learn a great secret, one that would ultimately save the world from terrible pain and suffering. The price for me has been untold mental anguish which even now I battle to hold in check. But I would share this secret with you now. It will not bring anguish to you, only peace. I speak truth do I not?"

Katil looked at her twin sister warily and more than a little puzzlement and jaundice. But the spell of troth held, of that Katil was sure. There was no telltale snapping of the synapses that would have told her of diabolic falsehood.

"Tell away then." was all she said. The screams and clashing sounds of skirmish outside could still be heard.

Jadis walked closer, and gently took her twin sister's hands in hers. Katil looked at her uncertainly, emotionally and with more than a little distrust. But Jadis looked deep into Katil's green eyes, her own wet with suppressed tears and said "I never stopped loving you dearest one, my womb sister. Here is the great secret."

Then bending towards her, drawing her into her arms, Jadis spoke the Deplorable Word in a whisper into Katil's ear.

Katil slumped. All external sound stopped in an instant. Silence had descended. All hearts stopped except for Jadis's own. She supported Katil's body and carrying her to the alcove to the rear of the room, laid her gently on the couch, then she bent and kissed her, her eyes filled with tears. She may live to curse her sister in a future age but at this moment all that was held in abeyance.

Turning briskly, Jadis thrust open the doors and strode away for the last time down the tiled and stone arcades, halls, balustrades and stairs strewn with the dead. Her vision blurred, her eyes were stinging. Decapitated soldiers lay here and there, hewn body parts of both sides of the conflict. The servants had all fled long ago. But all were dead, everywhere in this dismal world. Blood pooled but no longer flowed.

Jadis made her way out to the high terrace and rubbing her eyes to clear them, overlooked Charn. One moon was visible, one great star and the huge red sun hanging low in the sky of the west, about 20 degrees above the horizon. The temples and ziggurats, the great arenas and the towers cast dark shadows south-eastwards over a dusty reddened cityscape. A meteor that had been shooting across the sky leaving a bright streak sat immobile, caught, its corruscating noxious smoke trail set like a complex marble sculpture across the sky. Even the clouds were stationary.

Time had stopped in its tracks! Even the flow of the river seemed frozen though it was not ice. Perversely, Jadis wondered what it would feel like to touch this timeless river, to sink beneath its depths. Would she be able to breathe under its surface? She realised that she had become a ghost. Perhaps everyone else was still alive in a world of true time somewhere and she was the one dead!

It was a curious effect of the Deplorable word that she had not fully foreseen. She could not help but imagine that if there HAD been anyone else still alive they would be observing her movements as a fast blur. But now that she had ended all life, time was frozen indefinitely.

Only the infinitesimal drying of the world would begin. The vines which had been vigorously festooning the pillars of the high terrace were already wilting, their frowsy scented trumpet blooms withered and still. No wind to stir them. Even their scent was gone. Eventually they would mummify and desiccate. No fertile humors to make them rot and decay, only the forces of slow evaporation. No rain and no wind.

The blue green trees along the river boulevards were the only illusion of life left at this distance. No doubt, eventually even the river would dry, leaving its grey dusty bed exposed to the dark sky and the dull but inexorable sun. The river, all the rivers, and great salt lakes, even they would defy the spell of dead timelessness and would gradually disappear.

She must prepare. Indeed, she realised perversely, at this end of things, she must hurry. Her own mind was at risk in this strange timeless space she had created.

Jadis turned and went back indoors. Striding the palace corridors, she saw more bodies. Even the tread of her sandaled feet set off no echoes. She returned to her own chambers and stepping over the bodies of her servant women and the guards she entered her inner apartments.

She removed her white kilt. It had done its job. She had disarmed her sister long enough to make peace with her. Naked she washed herself with scented water from face to toe. The water behaved strangely, sluggishly, as if reluctant to stir itself or to fall back into the basin. She found she had to lave herself and grasp globules of water in her hands out of the air, after squeezing the sponge. The scent was barely detectable, but the water on her skin was pleasantly cooling.

She unbound and combed her long dark tresses, braiding several around her temples in the formal manner, leaving her unshorn locks tumbling about her shoulders. Then she applied the blue and black kohl about her eyes as she should have worn when seated in state with Katil on the twin thrones. Then she donned her silken robes of purple and green, a long stole of shimmering silver about her shoulders fringed with the tail plumes of the red sun-dragon. Finally, the diadem of the last Ruling Queen went on her head and the ensemble was complete.

Then to the Hall of Images. She suspected that even with time frozen in its tracks, the hall would succumb to fate, the wax effigies slowly slumping and sloughing to shapeless pools of rich cloth, jewels and melted flesh. Unless she imbued the place with a further spell of keeping. But she had prepared for that.

Once she had made her mind up, there had never really been any doubt of her actions, but she was relieved that she had been able to bid her sister farewell in the best manner she could have in the circumstances. Jadis had saved her sister, the nobility and the rest of this world from a far worse horror. It gave her some peace as she contemplated the sentence she had committed herself to.

She entered the hall and was careful to leave each of the doors around the gallery slightly ajar. When the eminent magician with the stupendous power to travel between worlds arrived in this city, he, she or it would need to be able to enter with ease. Else the wait might take until the end of the universe. And that would be too late indeed.

There sat the stone pillar and the bell and the hammer atop it as arranged. Jadis walked along the rows of faces, noting as never before the expressions of despair, gravity and depravity that had come to characterise her ancestors in the last several hundred years. And even though they were works of craft, they were accurate portrayals. She recognised that more than a few must have known what she had come to know, but had remained silent. Well, she had not made their mistake, brave fools! She had been audacious and driven and ruthless enough to face the truth, speak the truth and learn the trigger to end it all. And now it was ended.

Jadis strode to the bell, took up the hammer, breathed deeply for a few moments, spoke further words of power and struck it smartly. Immediately the room was enveloped in a vast deep deafening throbbing sound. With effort, she put the hammer back in its place, and almost had to swim through the vibrations to her place on the end of the row and take her seat amongst the wax effigies in all their finery. Gradually the tone quickened and eventually sweetened and within half an hour the pitch had risen so high and fast it was almost beyond hearing. Jadis was now sitting erectly immobile, hands placidly in her embroidered lap, her eyes still bright and glistening. But as the sound finally died away, even that sign of life was gone. There was no breath. Jadis was now bound in her own spell and sustained by this for an eternity, as if looking down on herself and this hall from somewhere above.

Her watchful mind was on alert for an end to the timelessness outside the hall. She was waiting to draw in an adventurous stranger from beyond space and time to strike the bell again for her awakening and departure from this cosmic well of misfortune.

...


End file.
